Posts Tagged ‘shmup’
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A.R.E.S. : Extinction Agenda – a lovely Abuse/Contra style indie game
21st Jan 20111For days Chris from HyperDuck SoundWorks has been tweeting that the new indie platformer shooter A.R.E.S. by Extend Studio would be available from Steam January 19th. Tonight he was kind enough to throw a Steam code my way, and I just had a total blast of an hour playing it!
Despite having the same name as a popular torrent client (not great for SEO guys!) A.R.E.S has a very similar game mechanic to the classic PC exploration shooter Abuse. You run with the WASD keys and aim/shoot with the mouse. If you’ve got an Xbox 360 controller you can plug this in instead, and actually the 360 roots of this title are evident everywhere, from the options menu to the control set-up. That’s probably because A.R.E.S was the XNA Dream Build Play 2010 first prize winner, and will be released on XBLA soon.
A quirky intro story about rescuing hostages starts things off, but to be fair you’d be forgiven for skipping this and diving right into the meat. The first few sections train you up. The double-jump feels a little strange, and I can’t help but feel that the duck and roll should be more automatic (probably feels more natural on an xbox controller), but within minutes you are happily running, blasting and collecting drops.
Along the way your guide will introduce new features to you at a pretty rapid pace. When shot baddies drop 3 different types of collectibles (think Mario coins). You can spend these creating new items, such as grenades, or upgrading existing weapons. This is a nice touch, as it forces you to hoover up the liberal spillage that spews from downed opponents. Work your way through enough of them and soon you’ll encounter a boss. There are smaller mid-way bosses, and giant end of level endeavours that require some serious blasting to complete. I particuarly liked the first boss (below) which reminded me a lot of the boss from Contra: Alien Wars that rips its way through the walls at you.
There are lots of aspects of A.R.E.S that offer gentle nods to gaming in general. From the screen shakes, glow effects, roaring mechanical beasts, to the manga characters and detailed scoring system – old-school console gaming blood runs deep in its veins. Graphically it’s a quirky style. Levels are built in blocky 3D, but traversed in a very 2D manner. Backgrounds are detailed and animated. Where-as the main character and enemies often appear very vector / Flash in style. Yet the boss characters look decidedly hand-drawn, with all the texture you’d expect that to give. And on-top of this is a glowing, blooming, rippling sheen. So it’s quite a mixed bag, but most of the time it manages to gel.
Special mention has to be given to the music. It fits the game perfectly. Think Japanese style synth rock! and you’ll be close. There are so many tracks, and they really pump-up the atmosphere in-game. Hopefully the soundtrack will be available to buy once the game has had a chance to settle. In the meantime there is a great interview with Chris over at DIY Gamer (and 9 tracks to listen to).
I’ll wrap-up by showing you this video. That should be convincing enough 🙂
A.R.E.S. is available to buy on Steam (with a 10% discount at the time of writing) and should be on XBLA soon.
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Awesome Retroshoot 360 preview video
8th Jan 2010Dave Munsies classic Retroshoot is coming back in full force as “Retroshoot 360 – Return of the Retronauts”. Here’s a special preview video. Watch it in HD if you have the bandwidth, because this is smegging awesome!
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Great Retro Shoot developer interview
22nd Apr 2009
Jeff over at 8-bit Rocket has published an awesome interview with Dave Munsie, the creator of the current Flash shmup darling Retro Shoot. It’s a great game and a great interview, so I urge you to both play it and read it 🙂
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(Spoiler!) Play test my 4kb Game Competition entry
26th Feb 2009My 4kb Game Competition entry is very nearly finished. I’m in the final “tweaking” stages, trying to get the last few small bugs out, and iron the gameplay a little so it’s less “random” and even more progressive.
The game is a twitch shooter based (loosley!) on Geometry Wars and requires some pretty mad flying skillz to last more than 30 seconds. The idea is literally to see what kind of score you can get. Here’s a screenie:
There are 10 different baddies, “boss waves”, bullet power-ups and particle explosion effects galore! (I went a bit over the top in all honesty). I’d love to have added sound, but I’m pushed to the limit of my 4096 bytes shackles already.
I know the game isn’t quite as “playable” as it should be, and I’ll work on that in the final few days left before I need to submit to the contest. I also know I don’t have a chance of winning (having seen some of the other entries lined-up!), but it was bloody great fun to code anyway.
And so as a sneak peak to you here’s the latest beta to play. Comments welcome (but please do bear in mind this whole game had to fit into 4096 bytes, so don’t go requesting anything insane ok?!)
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